An enemy of an enemy is not always our friend April 18, 2024
The reporters that were last to be axed by my former
publication have gone on a mission to get local governments to honor the
publication’s legacy, which was largely gutted by an idiot who inherited a
legitimate news organization and turned it into a joke.
We got taken over in 2016 with a lot of promises about
keeping the institution’s integrity only to have the old man who set it up die,
and his son – a rather pathetic twit –deciding he hated news and wanted to go
back to selling snake oil in the guise of newspaper inserts.
This is a man who apparently hated his father’s legacy so
much that he has made a career of destroying it, one pathetic newspaper at a
time.
This is a man who used his HR person as his personal hitman,
and like all bad cop movies, axed the HR person who he ran out of other people
to fire.
His crimes against journalism go far deeper than merely
destroying our institution, turning it into a pathetic joke, he – like the Romans
so many, many centuries ago, decided to salt the earth as to completely murder the
legacy, something I feared before I got axed in 2018 when he henchmen took off
with the print archive of our publication that went back to the early 1980s,
and refused to say what they did with it.
It only got worse. When they finally closed the doors on
those who actually did the work putting out the paper, the gutted the website
archive as well, and removed the bylines of those few stories from the past
they left untrampled on.
So, several generations of really worthy writers lost their
legacy, and worse, the area we covered lost a valuable and irreplaceable
history which can be found nowhere else.
What this idiot’s motives are, I can’t say – although as
pointed out, he most likely hated his father and by driving the stake into the heart
of the news organization, he is killing off a memory of man he apparently
blames for his own pointless life as a snake oil salesman.
I don’t blame the reporters for doing what they are doing, squeezing
out of his bad situation whatever juice and recognition denied them by this
demon, seeking to get the wider community to recognize a murder scene and to
help the victims of this heinous crime.
But in our society, even other journalists seem unwilling to
take on this criminal act or help repair this circular moron has done to journalism
itself, an argument my colleagues made in much less bitter tones at the public
portion of the meetings.
I spoke against the tribute for several reasons, because by
not pointing out this idiot’s hate crimes, we inadvertently honor him. It is
also questionable that we are asking the same public officials we are assigned
to monitor to take our side, when good journalism serves as a watch dog on
these people and to beg their aide against one of our own is a questionable
act.
Politicians are not our friends, not our allies, regardless
of how well-meaning there are, and to seek their aid is something like consorting
with the enemy. An enemy of an enemy is not always our friend.
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